Publicize Your Website Online for Free
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You may be under the impression that you must spend loads of money to advertise your blog or business website online — Not exactly true.. Have you heard of the Million Dollar HomePage (www.milliondollarhomepage.com)? Do you remember the unbelievable publicity it had? Well, all of that publicity was absolutely free of charge and was driven by individuals and social media websites.
Yes, you can advertise your website for free! This article has some useful tips, more will come so keep an eye on this category.
The following are how you can publicize your website online for free:
Self Promotion Websites
Self Promote your web site here:
Netstoresearch
http://www.netstoresearch.com
PowerSellersUnite (has an area where you can have your store link)
http://www.powersellersunite.com
Craigslist
Advertise online totally free at the free classifieds website Craig’s List, but be careful in what you say and how you say it, don’t violate the policies:
http://www.craigslist.org
Have a Space on MySpace or FaceBook
Start your own space on Myspace.com or facebook.com! Find people who share your interest or who have an interest in what you are selling, add them as friends.
Make Videos
Even a simple video can go long ways to attract attention on YouTube and other online video websites. It’s much cheaper than a 30 sec. ad on TV, it’s totally free, and you could have a 1 minute video ad or more if you wish. If you’re lucky, your video could become a viral video and spread around the world, for free.
Start a Blog
Start a blog, give useful advice while telling people who you are, where you are and what you are selling.
Contribute in Blogs
Contribute to other people’s blogs. Post on other blogs (without appearing spamesque of course!). If you give good advice, people will read your posts. You can invite others to visit your web site/blog for more ‘good advice’, or simply have a signature inserted for every post that you contribute that would contain a link to your web site.
Contribute in Forums
Contribute to discussion forums. Give good advice, people will read your replies in discussion threads and if they like what they see they will click on a link to your website, a link in your signature, or a link that you suggest they visit.
Social Bookmarking
I will write an article in the future on how powerful social bookmarking can be in reaching people, for free! For now, imagine how many visitors will read your article if it showed up on Digg.com for example!
Utilize Feeds
Many subscribe to feeds, so if you offer feeds on popular sites that aggregate feeds then your will have your articles appear on these sites for a larger audience who in turn will be directed to your website to read more. Look at http://www.feedburner.com/
Directory Submissions
Submit your site to directory websites like Yahoo and others.
Give Away Stuff
Give away free themes, templates, plug-ins, e-books, news, art, vidoes or even good content.
Encyclopedia Sites
Write about your website, business or service in wikipedia.org. Make sure that your article is in 3rd person and that it is informative and ‘encyclopedic’ and not clearly biased or it will be promptly deleted.
Local Community Websites
A newer generation of local community sites could offer you free publicity. One that I’m familiar with is TCPedia.com (www.tcpedia.com). TCPedia stands for Twin Cities Encyclopedia. This website is a local encyclopedia site offering wiki-style free encyclopedia pages (that need not be encyclopedic in nature), classifieds, events, blogs and much more to local (Twin Cities) residents only; you have to live or do business in the Twin Cities region in Minnesota in order to get to advertise yourself on TCPedia for free! If you do, you should utilize these free services to gain publicity both with people and search engines.
Affiliation
Become an affiliate to other websites and exchange links with them. You will link to them, and they will link to you.
All of these methods not only direct traffic to your website but also help increase your search engine ranking!
Paper
Yes, don’t forgot the good old paper method. Just print nice fliers and give them away, hang them in colleges and at coffee shops.
In closing, I just wanted to throw these out at you; I welcome all your ideas and contributions. If you send me ideas you will help build a more comprehensive list of online advertising and marketing strategies that are “free”.
